Hentai Game Design 100

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Bonus Feature: Each time I update I'll list a new feature of Mystic Girl (and save the really good ones for later just to be a tease). First up: Customizable hair colour! Yippee!
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Remember how not too long ago I listed some reasons why hentai games are inherently limited? And remember how soon afterwards I announced that I was making Mystic Girl? Well, being the intelligent perverts you are, you quickly caught on to the idea that perhaps I was planning to be the one to finally make a hentai game that is not completely lame. That I was ready to go all out and blow everyone away with a gushing flood of brilliance.

Which is a perfectly legitimate way of thinking that is unfortunately completely wrong.

You see, I don’t like making generalizing statements if I can not apply them to myself as well. If I had intended to make the greatest hentai game EVAR!~!1 then I probably would have just come out and said it. Screw this industry, I’m gonna show ‘em all how to do it! But I’m not, and mainly for the reasons that I already applied to other developers.

Chief among those is that at any given moment I’m splitting my time between:
a) Work
b) An independent project
c) A side project
d) Personal life & free time
e) Hentai

And when one does that it becomes hard to do a very good job on whatever is on the bottom of the list. Mystic Girl is on the bottom of the list.

Now here’s where we get to game design. You see, the popular view of game design is that the job of a game designer (read: me) is to sit around coming up with cool ideas to put into the game. Bzzzt, wrong. If designing a game is like dating, thinking up features doesn't even constitute reaching first base. The reason being is that I can sit around all day figuring out "tons of positions" to use and "awesome gameplay mechanics" to implement and "sexy characters" to include and none of it means anything because I can't feasibly make any of it because I don't have the time. Even from a practical standpoint it would be a waste to think of that stuff as you guys will do it for me. I can go through my email inbox and pick out thousands of great ideas in a matter of minutes (some less great than others, but still), all of which I can't reasonably pull off.

So what exactly does "designing" Mystic Girl mean, then?

I have a set of requirements I have to fill. I need to make a game with more features than Demon Girl, I need it to take less work than Demon Girl, I need to it run in Flash which lacks hardware acceleration (read: runs like utter shit). When I think of a sex position, how erotic it is takes a backseat to how little work it takes to draw it. When I draw a background, how good it looks is trumped by how badly it drops the frame rate. "How awesome would it be if" is less important than "how well does it work for me".

Designing a game is about filtering ideas.

Don't get too down about it. I'm not being doom and gloom here, this is nothing new. JG and DG went through the same process and if you are here then chances are you enjoyed them. Taking the experience I got from making them, I can make a better game in less time with less work. I just can't make 50 levels with 10 monsters in each one all of whom trigger 5 positions if they get past your 100 techniques and items for fighting them while the 3 AI girls with you, running at 24 hand-drawn frames per second, get covered in dynamically generated cum patterns.

But if anyone wants to send me $50 000 that would change things.